Watson crushed competitors Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter at their first …

Watson, the computer built by IBM to play Jeopardy, outdid itself in the second half of its first official game against champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Watson finished with $35,734 to Rutter's $10,400 and Jenning's $4,800, despite coming up with a very wrong answer to what appeared to be a fairly straightforward final Jeopardy question on the topic of "US Cities."

The answer was, "Its largest airport was named for a World War II hero; its second largest, for a World War II battle." Both Jennings and Rutter got the correct question— "What is Chicago?"— while Watson put down "What is Toronto???" Dr. Chris Welty, who worked on the algorithms team during Watson's development, said that the phrasing of the question demonstrated again Watson's difficulty with implicit meanings and how quickly it can become tough for the computer to sort out what type of question the answer is looking for.

"If you change the question to 'This US City's largest airport ', Watson gets the right answer," Welty said during a panel at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Welty pointed out that though categories in Jeopardy seem like they will have a set type of answers, they almost never do, and Watson was taught not to assume they would.

For instance, in the category of state capitals, it might seem like the answer will always be of the form "What is [state capital]?" But an answer could be "The capital of New York is bordered by this river," making the question "What is the Hudson?" Because the phrasing of the answer was not precise enough for Watson to pinpoint the type of the question it was looking for, it struggled to get the correct question. "We do look at the category, but we don't necessarily trust that information as a 'type,'" Welty said. Toronto was also associated more with World War II battlefields than Chicago was in Watson's information store.

Welty said Watson was also confused by the second clause of the answer, "its second largest, for a World War II battle," because it can't understand context. It's obvious to humans based on phrasing that the second part of the answer is also referring to an airport, but Watson is unable to parse implicit information.

Fortunately, Watson only bet $947 on the final question, so it held on to most of what it had earned through the rest of the game and the two Daily Doubles it nailed earlier, questions on which it also bet very specific dollar amounts. While most humans bet in round numbers, the game theorist that worked on Watson's gambling abilities chose not to make the computer so reserved. On its first Daily Double, Watson told Trebek, "I'll wager 6,345 dollars." Trebek shook his head and said, "I won't even ask."

Buzzer beaters

Though Watson seemed to be running the round and beating Jennings and Rutter to the punch with its answers many times, Welty insisted that Watson had no particular advantage in terms of buzzer speed. Players can't buzz in to give their questions until a light turns on after the answer is read, but Welty says that humans have the advantage of timing and rhythm.

"They're not waiting for the light to come on," Welty said; rather, the human players try to time their buzzer presses so that they're coming in as close as possible to the light. Though Watson's reaction times are faster than a human, Welty noted that Watson has to wait for the light. Dr. Adam Lally, another member of Watson's team, noted that "Ken and Brad are really fast. They have to be."

Welty also commented on Watson's seemingly scattershot process of selecting squares on the board, saying it is similar to Jennings' approach of Daily Double-hunting. "Jennings opened up starting to look for the Daily Double right away—that's the style he plays—but Watson was doing the same thing. That's why they were always selecting clues in the bottom three," Welty said.

Though Watson enjoyed a landslide victory in the first game, Welty and Lally said they weren't at all confident Watson would go on to win the second game and therefore the match. When the first game was over, "our anxiety had not lessened by even a slight bit," Welty said. "The next game could very easily go the other way." Watson, Jennings, and Rutter will play a second game of Jeopardy tonight, and the player with the highest winnings over both games will be declared the winner of the Jeopardy IBM Challenge.

Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston

123 Reader Comments

What Watson demonstrated is that in a reasonable everyday demonstration of understating context, a computer can now be FASTER than humans.

It in no way demonstrated that.

Watson could out buzz the competitors, that's pretty much established. The question still remains whether or not Watson could answer more of the questions than the humans. Or even whether or not he could answer them faster. Until there is a screen under Jennings and Rutter indicating exactly when they arrive at their conclusion that can't be established.

I think this demonstrates the failure of A.I. more than anything. On the spectrum of A.I. advancement between "correlation of statistics" to "please don't shut me off", this is still _way_ closer to the former than the latter.

Are you high or something?Attributing Watson's success to his ability to click faster is, though quite silly, at least a valid point. Claiming this is a failure rather than an amazing achievement is just plain ignorant. Please, don't bother commenting on Ars articles, you obviously don't belong here.

Hahaha. I don't belong here because I have more faith in the ability of computational neuroscience to achieve strong A.I and artificial consciousness than I do in the ability of advanced statistical learning theory and connectionism to get us there? Sorry. I will try to comment less.

Yeah, I've always found the buzzer-speed aspect of Jeopardy annoying and it seems like it would be so easy to fix.

Just create a short window, say 1/2 a second, after the question is read, and take anyone who has buzzed in in that period to have tied, and then just rotate the opportunity to answer the question in ties. That is, the first time players A and B tie, it is randomly determined who gets to answer (say B), and the next time the tie goes to the other one (A) and so forth. There are enough rounds that the impact of this would effectively average out.

It seems like that would improve the game by 3x right there, and would make the man vs machine contest actually meaningful instead of a mindless buzzer speed contest.

They should also keep track of ties, and make the questions harder when great players are playing, so that on average only one person per question knows the right answer.

Ha, based on the screenshot there they did show Watson's top answers (I assume they did this regardless of whether Watson buzzed in). Proves I should watch the show before discussing it (I recorded it).

As good as Watson is, it's questions aren't always correctly formed. It answered "What" instead of "Who" a couple times and I was wondering if Trebek would give humans credit if they'd made such linguistic errors. I know its a technicality, but that's kind of the point, isn't it? Then again, maybe we could cut someone slack if they were a non-native speaker of English (with Watson being a native binary speaker).

i noticed that on most of the short questions (1-3 words), humans got the answer first most of the time, and the computer was still polling itself for results. this is a situation where button speed doesn't affect the outcome, and humans win.

as super interesting and amazing as this was, i think it overall was more of a letdown because of complaints everyone has. i think the computer that beat the chess grandmaster was more interesting, even though it was really inevitable.

I often feel like Watson only has any advantage when he understand the context of the questions IE if it's phrased in a parse-able way he'll clear up but there are whole categories he just doesn't get, he wins because on the categories he can parse he is much much faster than the humans, where as 3 comparable humans would be splitting the category between themselves.

In a way it it's s bit like having a racing car compete in a decathlon, its points in the running events will be so great that they will more than make up for the lack of points in the jumping and throwing. If Watson were a more rounded player it would be more interesting.

The question IBM set out to answer was: "Can we design a computer that can out-perform the best players at Jeopardy?" And act according to the rules of Jeopardy. The rules of Jeopardy don't say that you can't have superhuman speed at pushing a button. The rules of Jeopardy don't say anything about needing to handicap a player with an obvious speed advantage. So Watson has answered the question they set out to answer. Just because you don't like how he did it, does not mean they failed, or Watson is cheating.

Even the worst computers have been capable of defeating the best humans at button pressing contests by orders of magnitude decades ago. I don't think we needed an IBM commercial masquerading as a game show to prove this, either.

So I guess the point is, the question they set out to answer is uninteresting.

As Erus alluded to above, a much more interesting question would be "how close the computer really is to a top human at answering open domain Jeopardy style queries which is the real story, IMHO."

**edit**

And of course the rules don't say that you can't have superhuman buzzing speed... the game is for human players, that rule would be unnecessary.

Find me where in the Jeopardy rules that it mentions the word "human".

Jeopardy isn't just about who's faster with the button. If you're the fastest with the button, but you don't actually know the answer, you will lose badly. You need to be both fast with the button, AND good at answering the questions. If you have either skill without the other skill, you don't make a good Jeopardy player.

Your suggestions are completely off base. Watson has LESS time to answer questions because it doesn't cheat by buzzing when it doesn't have the answer.

Considering that I frequently knew some of the answers before Alex finished reading it, my expectation is that for many of those questions, none of the contestants (Watson included) needed that "cheat" time. In that case, the question is a buzzer competition. Which is fine in the context of the game Jeopardy, but isn't particularly interesting. I find the fact that the computer can answer the question correctly much more compelling. So I'd like to separate those variables.

It's very likely that if you didn't put any limit on how early the buzzer can be pushed, Watson would win even more easily since it seems to be faster at computing than the human players.

Perhaps it's notable too that these are the best human players in existence.

Quote:

tzt wrote:

Also, if you add the two human scores, they're going to be better than the score with each individually since they combine the strengths of them both.

Which is why my initial comment suggested a single human player.

Yes, but adding the numbers from the humans would provide a higher score than they can achieve individually. Otherwise watson wins even more easily.

So when the two humans crush the competition at answering stupidly easy questions by buzzing in the fastest, they get book deals. But when a computer does it suddenly it's a hand-wringing cause for concern and a serious discussion about the rules of the game?

Sounds like Watson out-Jenningsed Jennings and out-Ruttered Rutter. Anything you can memorize a computer can memorize better. (And Watson is significantly more generous with his winnings! Nothing less human than that.)

If anyone's cheating with the buzzer, it's the humans. Watson doesn't buzz in unless it has the answer and people often do. IOW, Watson is far faster than the buzzer competition would imply. If it could "cheat" in the same way, none of the others would even have a chance.

There's also no cheating on presenting the questions. All contestants are shown them in text form at the same time.

People that buzz in without the answer run the risk of losing money when they can't come up with it (this is different than buzzing in with the wrong answer, which both people and Watson do). They could even alter Watson to do this as well (if he has a response with at least X% confidence, buzz in instantly, then wait until the final moment to deliver the current highest-probability answer/question before time is called).

Yes, but it's a distinct advantage. Basically if Watson improves a bit more and then they add this feature, it would be unbeatable.

What Watson demonstrated is that in a reasonable everyday demonstration of understating context, a computer can now be FASTER than humans.

It in no way demonstrated that.

Watson could out buzz the competitors, that's pretty much established. The question still remains whether or not Watson could answer more of the questions than the humans. Or even whether or not he could answer them faster. Until there is a screen under Jennings and Rutter indicating exactly when they arrive at their conclusion that can't be established.

You have to remember that trivia is actually a very difficult problem to solve because of the massive number of contexts available. The fact that an essentially v1 product can at least equal the best available players means that it's already far superior to the rest of us mere mortals and only a matter of brief time before it's unbeatable at this type of game.

This is basically like making excuses for Kasparov during the first competition.

In order to make this more interesting, you'd have to deepen the knowledge pool to the level of stuff that's not easily accessible for example through google. It's already amply demonstrated they can replicate the brain well enough for general knowledge gathering.

"Thinking", working things out, is the next giant leap and perhaps the final frontier.

Was Toronto associated more with being in the US, than Chicago was, in Watson's information store?

Nitpicking aside, this was a very impressive performance, and it is unfortunate that the buzzer issue has distracted attention from that. If IBM were able to give some numbers in support of the 'no advantage' claim, that would help.

No question that this was an advance in computational ability that will be an historic moment.

As mentioned, Watson had a speed advantage with the buzzer. But even more important was the fact that he would never find himself locked out by buzzing in too soon as the humans often did. They may have had the right answer before Watson but clicking early meant they would ultimately have to wait allowing the computer to ring in. That might have been more critical in the long run.

I think that Watson's mistake with Toronto is not a big deal. I'll just copy the possible explanation of its reasoning from physorg:

The exact question is an indicator to what went wrong.

"Its largest airport is named for a WWII hero. Its second largest, for a WWII battle"

"Toronto is the 2nd largest city in Jefferson County, Ohio, United States" - Wikipedia.

Then there's the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation which was based in Ohio, and many war heroes came from Ohio. Doing a related keywords search on WW2 hero, WW2 battle, airport, "second largest", US cities etc. easily produces a stronger signal on Toronto, Ohio, because the machine doesn't understand what part of the question is essential and what should be taken literally.

It is really no surprise that a computer can be much much faster than human in both thinking speed as well as mechanical speed. Neurons and neural signals are updated, stimulated and travel at a much lower speed than computer signals. While human may have an advantage in some kind of parallel processing capacity, the computer can in principle just add more processors and memory to make up for it. Not to mention a human brain generates heaps of neural noise which must be filtered (these noise usually manifests as errors, irrationality, emotion, fatigue etc) while a computer always function with perfect accuracy, rationality and top performance. So for anything competing on speed and memory, human will lose.

The only real front for competition between human and computer is the thinking-algorithm, ie general intelligence. And the only way that that a human can beat a computer is that they have a vastly superior hardware+software algorithm for the problem, enough to compensate for their lack of speed and memory. This jeopardy game did demonstrate that computers can beat human on the problem level of Jeopardy, and it should be appreciated as such.

Really, if one accept that human mind is of physical existence, it is just a matter of time before computers excess human capacity. There is no reason to believe that the human brain is the pinnacle creation of intelligence hardware (it is simply what evolution has pushed to so far), and once AI scientists figure out the physics of general intelligence they can build far superior hardware for that. And a human is fundamentally limited by a single brain and communication among humans is of extremely low efficiency, while computers can indefinitely add processors and memory and communicates with high efficiency. It is not even fair to make one human competes against one computer, since one human is defined as one physical brain, but "one" computer can be an indefinite amount of processors and memory or even a large computer grid. OTOH if scientists can truly figure out the physics of mind then they can in principle integrate human mind with computer mind, so a human vs computer competition would be meaningless by that point.

Watson both impressed me and disappointed me. On one hand he was able to answer some questions where I told myself "there's no way he's getting that". But on the other hand, there were cases where he'd get the answer but say "what" instead of "who". Also there were responses which made it seem like more keyword matching was going on than understanding the meaning of question.

Consider this example "Maurice LaMarche found his inner Orson Welles to voice this rodent whose simple goal was to take over the world". Watson's best guess was "Pinky and the Brain" (the show) as opposed to "The Brain" (the rodent).

Another example is "Cape Hatteras is known as this cemetery synonym "of the Atlantic". His best guess was "Graveyard of the Atlantic" instead of "Graveyard". And these are just the first two I could find. This sort of thing was happening all last night.

I also found it funny that he didn't get a single question in the computer keys section right

It heartens me to see other fellow Ars readers are not being taken in by the smoke and mirrors used in this advertisement for IBM. Of course it has an advantage with the buzzer. Of course it had an advantage with being fed the question in the form of text, instead of having to devote processing power to understanding the shapes and colours in front of it (a task we normally call reading). Of course it has an advantage by having a vast database of facts as its disposal that it can retrieve accurately every single time it requests one. Of course it won, IBM would not have put up the money for something like this if it were a genuine contest. Of course the programmers are going to lie about there being no buzzer advantage - the whole thing is smoke and mirrors from start to finish. Speaking as someone who has programmed AI on a number of strategy games, trust me, the whole of AI is trickery. Make it /appear/ to be smart. That's the goal.

What happened to the Video Daily Doubles? Humanity could have rallied in the second round, if the judges and question writers weren't such TRAITORS to meatkind. "How many fingers" would be a perfectly cromulent category here, a "Peter Sellers" topic that must be answered in the form of a funny accent would work as well.

Also, the Toronto answer could well be simple trolling. Watson may have been programmed to throw that midpoint question in a way that breaks important human boundary distinctions (such as gender or nationality). Such a gaffe does better lingering in news and gossip, which is good advertising. According to strategery nerds, that midpoint wager doesn't have a large effect on the overall game, anyway.

To all of those who keep going on about the Buzzer... You're heading down the garden path.

Doesn't matter how quick your buzzer is - if you don't know the right answer, then you lose the points, and thus the game.

A "Button Mashing Bot" can no more win than a Chimpanzee. Keep claiming unfair all you want, but the rules of the game are - If you Buzz in and give wrong answer, you lose the points. It takes an impressive bit of hardware to get answers as close as it did.

Heh, you seem to be unaware of the fact that Watson does indeed have an appendage and physically buzzes in.

As for claiming it should have to read the answer, I don't see how that's going to be any slower than sending a text file, really.

I think this is pretty cool but agree that its more of the "correlation of statistics" than "please don't unplug me" variety. Watson doesn't "know" its playing a game. It gets input, it processes it, it spits it out. It's very good at it and pointing this out isn't my way of pissing in its cheerios or downplaying the advances this technology can bring. But C3PO is still a long way off.

Actually I was thinking of something more complicated, like robotic arms similar to a humans, than using a simple actuator. As for reading the question, the delay could be everything compared to .getting the question instantly in whole while Alex is still reading the answer aloud.

Speaking as someone who has programmed AI on a number of strategy games, trust me, the whole of AI is trickery. Make it /appear/ to be smart. That's the goal.

IBM has never hidden their goal. This Jeopardy contest is just an advertisement for their DeepQA technology. But they haven't tried to keep that secret -- they've pretty much stated it explicitly.

IBM's goal is to produce something akin to the Star Trek library computer -- ask it a question in natural language and get a response. That's why Watson's performance on straightforward information-seeking questions is the most important. It doesn't need to be particularly good at getting the more "clever" questions, because people using the technology to seek information are not going to be trying to fool the computer.

No one trying to seek information would say "Its largest airport is named for a WWII hero. Its second largest, for a WWII battle." They would only state it this way if they were trying to test your knowledge, which is a different goal from information retrieval. Ultimately, the technology will be used by people who *want* to get the answer. Watson got nearly every directly-worded information-seeking question right, and it still got many of the clever, deceptive questions--which indicates that it should be very good at its intended purpose.

Since this ultimately will be used by humans, stuff like this:

Quote:

Consider this example "Maurice LaMarche found his inner Orson Welles to voice this rodent whose simple goal was to take over the world". Watson's best guess was "Pinky and the Brain" (the show) as opposed to "The Brain" (the rodent).

Another example is "Cape Hatteras is known as this cemetery synonym "of the Atlantic". His best guess was "Graveyard of the Atlantic" instead of "Graveyard". And these are just the first two I could find. This sort of thing was happening all last night.

is not terribly important. It's not designed to replace human thinking; upon receiving one of these answers, the human operator could easily deduce the correct part of the answer.

I heard (or read) somewhere that the questions were entered into Watson via keyboard and not via voice recogntion. Is that correct? If so, make it a more equitable test and have Watson do voice recognition and THEN answer the questions if it can interpret them correctly. The humans have to do that.

To all of those who keep going on about the Buzzer... You're heading down the garden path.

Doesn't matter how quick your buzzer is - if you don't know the right answer, then you lose the points, and thus the game.

These are smart guys, they also know the answer most of the time. But they have an almost impossible task trying to beat the computer to the buzzer, so it becomes a buttom mashing, reaction time contest and the computer will always win that.

They may have made great strides on Natural Language processing, but they venue they chose to demonstrated it in, is unfortunately one that heavily biased on button mashing ability, where Eniac would have triumphed over humans long, long ago.

Ooh I know! Strategically placed electrodes on a human volunteer's arm could be electrified by Watson, causing them to press the buzzer, thus introducing a random delay and an amusing sideshow. It's a win-win.

It isn't working out the answer, it's merely shifting through a mountain of data and assigning various priorities to what it finds, then sorting the results by relevance and answering with its most relevant result. Sound familiar?

Any search engine can collect together a million hits for your search result ( sorted by relevance), long, long before any person could do that. Information retrieval and storage are exactly what computers excel at, after calculation. We've all known this for a very long time.

The only really new thing is the language processing element which the show is supposed to show off, but as others have pointed out, this wasn't actually a good forum for doing that.

But on the other hand, there were cases where he'd get the answer but say "what" instead of "who".

This really bothered me that they accepted this type of mistake repeatedly as correct, when in a real Jeopardy match they would have gotten it wrong with Trebek's condescending tone letting them know how stupid they were to phrase it the wrong way.

Especially the one cited before of "what is maxwell's silver hammer?" when the question should have been "who is maxwell?". That should NOT have been counted as correct IMO. The category was called "Beatles People" not "Beatles People's Tools".

Considering that the other two players had a really hard time with the clickers I would think Watson definitely has an advantage over them. The other two players clearly knew the answers but weren't able to click faster than Watson as evidenced by Jennings facial expressions towards the end of the second half.

I noticed that as well. The other players seemed to be clicking away with their buzzers while Watson regularly had control immediately once the answer was read. The creators can say what they want, I know what I witnessed.

the programmers are right, watson has to wait for the light (the input it gets indicating that the light is on) The computer is clearly able to process the fact that the light is on faster than the humans can. Watson activates the light using a plunger to press the button as shown in day one. Remember WATSON cannot see or hear.......

Also if Watson is not sure of an answer, it typically does not buzz in although it did a few times and was correct on some and incorrect on others.

Considering that the other two players had a really hard time with the clickers I would think Watson definitely has an advantage over them. The other two players clearly knew the answers but weren't able to click faster than Watson as evidenced by Jennings facial expressions towards the end of the second half.

I noticed that as well. The other players seemed to be clicking away with their buzzers while Watson regularly had control immediately once the answer was read. The creators can say what they want, I know what I witnessed.

the programmers are right, watson has to wait for the light (the input it gets indicating that the light is on) The computer is clearly able to process the fact that the light is on faster than the humans can. Watson activates the light using a plunger to press the button as shown in day one. .

No their characterization was incorrect. Neither the Humans nor Watson can buzz in until the light goes off. The humans are clicking early in desperation because they have absolutely ZERO chance of beating Watson to the buzzer if they wait for the light. But when they try to anticipate and click early, they risk clicking before the light goes on. Clicking early, before the light locks them out for 1/5 second.

Set up a gun in a vice with pop up target. The target will be in line with the gun in the vice, you can't miss. The target will pop up and disappear in 75 ms. If you wait for the target to appear, you will NEVER hit it. Never. Now you can shoot randomly hoping for the target to pop in front of your bullet, but that wont' happen very often. This is essentially what the humans are doing in any question where Watson also knows the answer.

The humans likely had as many answers right as Watson, but when Watson had calculated a correct answer, it would win the buzzer race almost every time, which is why it won.

The advances made in Language processing (the interesting part) is why Watson was able to compete, but the ridiculous buzzer speed advantage (the sucky part) is why it won.

Watson is quicker than them, but it is also right, it shows the advantages of a computer than can do natural language processing.

It's likely that Watson could be ran on my desktop PC, but that it would had have taken an age to work out the answer, clearly Watson is not the fastest supercomputer there is, so theoretically it could be even faster.

@ ScifiGeek - Eniac would not be able to win at Jeopardy. Yes, you might be able to get it to push a button, but at the end of round two and moving into final Jeopardy its Human 1 - No Points, Human 2, No points, Eniac Minus a heck of a lot. Not sure if under the rules thats a stalemate or human win, but its definately not a win for the bots.

@ ScifiGeek - Eniac would not be able to win at Jeopardy. Yes, you might be able to get it to push a button, but at the end of round two and moving into final Jeopardy its Human 1 - No Points, Human 2, No points, Eniac Minus a heck of a lot. Not sure if under the rules thats a stalemate or human win, but its definately not a win for the bots.

I never said Eniac would win at Jeopardy. Just that a large portion of the contest is reaction time, that Even Eniac would would win at, and that taints the result significantly.

It heartens me to see other fellow Ars readers are not being taken in by the smoke and mirrors used in this advertisement for IBM. Of course it has an advantage with the buzzer. Of course it had an advantage with being fed the question in the form of text, instead of having to devote processing power to understanding the shapes and colours in front of it (a task we normally call reading). Of course it has an advantage by having a vast database of facts as its disposal that it can retrieve accurately every single time it requests one. Of course it won, IBM would not have put up the money for something like this if it were a genuine contest. Of course the programmers are going to lie about there being no buzzer advantage - the whole thing is smoke and mirrors from start to finish. Speaking as someone who has programmed AI on a number of strategy games, trust me, the whole of AI is trickery. Make it /appear/ to be smart. That's the goal.

The problem is that you're comparing the Watson to what you've done as if that's the golden standard to judge things by.

Watson does understand context, at least in a similar way that humans do.

One example would be a question of Something that Coke introduced in 1963. Watson would "understand" that Coke manufactures products, and that an "introduction" for a production would be more akin to a birth, and not say, you "introducing" a friend. It would calculate a series of these contexts in parallel and pick the one that makes the most sense. IBM has also trained it with a shitload of experience (a lot of it jeopardy specific), not unlike how we've learned to pick up nuances in context over the years.

Perhaps it's not exactly the same as our pattern matching parallel supercomputers, but quite akin in it's style.

It's rather amazing that people consider this just a gimmick. It's terribly Kruger Dunning.

The other point these fools miss is that this is only the first major iteration. IBM themselves have said that they've made order of magnitude improvements in the last couple years. It's only a matter of time before these same fools who are claiming "I can do that too! herp derp" get replaced by one of these at their posts.

The biggest difference about the buzzer is that Watson will NEVER mess up and ring in early. It knows if it wants to ring in or not, then waits for the light to go on and immediate buzzes in, unerringly.

I would like to see a rematch with slightly different rules: All clues are read aloud ONLY. This puts humans and computer on equal ground for the input and requires a natural speech recognition capability. The computer should also be able to buzz in and search for answers, just as humans do. I'd like to see the computer adjust its buzzpoint as well. If it's winning or losing, it could tighten or loosen its confidence levels to try to maintain an edge or claw its way back.

And I agree that Watson needs to be held to the same standards regarding answer form. "The Brain" vs "Pinky and the Brain", Maxwell vs Maxwell''s hammer, Who/What, etc. You don't get it right, you don't get it right, yo.

I'd like to know if Watson "learned" to search for daily doubles on its own or if that was a directly programmed action.

And was anyone else disappointed that Ken didn't swing for the fences on the last question? Clearly intimidated and rather pathetic, I thought.

Considering that the other two players had a really hard time with the clickers I would think Watson definitely has an advantage over them. The other two players clearly knew the answers but weren't able to click faster than Watson as evidenced by Jennings facial expressions towards the end of the second half.

I noticed that as well. The other players seemed to be clicking away with their buzzers while Watson regularly had control immediately once the answer was read. The creators can say what they want, I know what I witnessed.

the programmers are right, watson has to wait for the light (the input it gets indicating that the light is on) The computer is clearly able to process the fact that the light is on faster than the humans can. Watson activates the light using a plunger to press the button as shown in day one. .

No their characterization was incorrect. Neither the Humans nor Watson can buzz in until the light goes off. The humans are clicking early in desperation because they have absolutely ZERO chance of beating Watson to the buzzer if they wait for the light. But when they try to anticipate and click early, they risk clicking before the light goes on. Clicking early, before the light locks them out for 1/5 second.

Set up a gun in a vice with pop up target. The target will be in line with the gun in the vice, you can't miss. The target will pop up and disappear in 75 ms. If you wait for the target to appear, you will NEVER hit it. Never. Now you can shoot randomly hoping for the target to pop in front of your bullet, but that wont' happen very often. This is essentially what the humans are doing in any question where Watson also knows the answer.

The humans likely had as many answers right as Watson, but when Watson had calculated a correct answer, it would win the buzzer race almost every time, which is why it won.

The advances made in Language processing (the interesting part) is why Watson was able to compete, but the ridiculous buzzer speed advantage (the sucky part) is why it won.

uhm say what? WATSON has to have the input indicating that the light is on active before he can press the button so in effect it has to "see" that the button is on just like the others do. Unfortunately for the humans, WASTON was able to arrive at the correct answer and process the fact that the light was on FASTER than the humans could. Occasionaly WATSON would guess and press the button but the VAST MAJORITY of the time, he arrived at the correct answer and pressed the button before the people did. WATSON has the same amt of time to calculate the answer as the huams do before the button goes active. It takes people and WATSON a certain amount of time to process the fact that the light is on and WATSON is SIGNICANTLY FASTER AT IT as demonstrated by the show.

The advantage that WATSON has is that does not have to process any video or audio information to determine what the question is unlike the human players do.......all it has to do is process a text file

uhm say what? WATSON has to have the input indicating that the light is on active before he can press the button so in effect it has to "see" that the button is on just like the others do. Unfortunately for the humans, WASTON was able to arrive at the correct answer and process the fact that the light was on FASTER than the humans could. Occasionaly WATSON would guess and press the button but the VAST MAJORITY of the time, he arrived at the correct answer and pressed the button before the people did. WATSON has the same amt of time to calculate the answer as the huams do before the button goes active. It takes people and WATSON a certain amount of time to process the fact that the light is on and WATSON is SIGNICANTLY FASTER AT IT as demonstrated by the show.

The advantage that WATSON has is that does not have to process any video or audio information to determine what the question is unlike the human players do.......all it has to do is process a text file

You are completely missing the point. Top players like Ken, read the question, have the answer before they are allowed to buzz in, so everyone is waiting for the question to end so they can answer, it then becomes a game of reaction time, which a machine is unbeatable at. Perhaps you need a visual. The point is top players will often all have the answer and simply waiting for the question to end so the can buzz in (#4). If you are in that race with a machine, you have negligible chance of beating Watson to the buzzer. The window for a human buzzing in, is the time interval between 4) and 5) which will be VERY small, much smaller than even the fastest human reflexes on the planet.

Code:

1) Clue flashed on screen, Sent to Watson electronically. | |2) Seconds while Alex reads clue where Watson/humans figure out answer. | |3) Humans and Watson have the response, all waiting for light to come on to answer. | |4) Light comes on5) Watson Buzzes in near instantly (humans have zero chance).

So I will reiterate and expand. There are few elements to Watson success.1) The really cool technology advances in language processing that allows Watson to be parse the clues. This is everything, this is the only impressive part. This is what lets Watson compete.2) Database to search for the response: trivial.3) Reaction Time to win buzz in race. To me it really taints that result when such a large part of the contest was based on something that quite literally the first general purpose electronic computer EVER would trounce humans at.

More should have been done to weight the buzz in race more evenly, because that really isn't the point here.